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Nuit Blanche 2014 lineup's a scream . . . and so much more

At the corner of Dundas and Spadina, a bright yellow box — occupancy: one — will be installed sometime during the afternoon of Oct. 4. By nightfall, it's open for business: screaming, which seems almost too practical for the event of which it's a part.

That would be Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2014, the overnight art extravaganza that's been growing by leaps and bounds since it launched nine years ago, and not without its pains. When a million people take to the streets overnight, with a litany of predictable mayhems to ensue, a specialized spot to let out some frustration seems more a public service than an art installation.

A detail of Bruno Billio's Bright Bundle, to be see at Fort York on Nuit Blanche.

Maria Ezcurra's Made In China, to be installed in a Chinatown alleyway for Nuit Blanche 2014.

A drawing of Dana Sherwood's The Melodious Malfeasance Meat-Grinding Machine, part of the Night Circus Program at Nuit Blanche 2014.

Walk Among Worlds, a project of Between The Earth and the Sky at Nuit Blanche 2014

Maybe it's both, but it's certainly the latter: A piece by Montreal-based Chelanie Beaudin-Quintin, Screaming Booth is one of 120-plus projects to be mounted over the 12-hour window by 400 artists from here and afar.

The official program was announced Wednesday morning, with dozens of independent projects outside the official city-commissioned purview yet to come as well. Within the city's programming between the four official curator-driven zones, spectacle abounds. Zone by zone, a few examples:

A. Downtown West — Between The Earth and the Sky, the Possibility of Everything

Making good use of Spadina Ave. as it trundles up through Chinatown, Between The Earth and the Sky is curated by Montreal-based Dominique Fontaine. She intends it as a “framework for experimentation,” and it's heavy on video and technology, but there are a few physical interventions that cut close. Screaming Booth is one; Made in China is another. Conceived by Maria Ezcurra, the project, to be installed in a Chinatown alleyway, is a single tapestry woven of clothing donated (mostly) by the local Chinese community. Each one affixed by the artist with a “Made in China” label, playing on the dominant manufacturing mode of North American business, of course, but also the accumulation of human capital we've gained in return.

If lights and flash are more your style, you're in luck. Projects such as Yvette Mattern's Global Rainbow at 220 Spadina Ave., use lasers to beam each colour of the spectrum in a simulation of an actual rainbow. If that's a little warm and fuzzy for your liking, then look no further than Alexandre Arrechea's Black Sun, which projects a massive, swinging wrecking ball into the night sky amid the lowrises near Spadina and Grange Aves.

B. Downtown South — The Night Circus

Here, curator Denise Markonish, from the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, uses circus as a loose metaphor for various spectacles of the night that range from the fanciful to the political to the captivatingly gruesome. For the latter, see Dana Sherwood's travelling sausage factory, The Melodious Malfeasance Meat-Grinding Machine, which is more or less as it sounds. The New York artist, positioned in a gypsy caravan filled with butchery tools and hanging cured meats, sets about transforming her wares into tube-shaped edibles. No word if she's sharing with the audience, but it seems a likely bet.

Following on the caravan theme, Creemore, Ont.'s own FASTWURMS offers up The Fortune Teller Machine: Zardoz, which, in their words, is “an interactive divination machine run by a coven of artist witches.” One thing's certain: Your future will not be boring.

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C. Fort York — Before Day Breaks

Finally, Nuit Blanche clicks in to the eerie possibilities of Fort York, those weird, sunken fields of green wedged between the Gardiner Expressway and the railroad tracks. Anywhere you'd still be afraid to go after dark in hyper-gentrified downtown Toronto suggests good possibilities for art, but we'll see.

Curator Magda Gonzalez-Morda casts a pretty wide net, suggesting her crew of artists will “attempt to cover different angles of reality.” What that means is really anything you want it to and, in that spirit, let's take Toronto-based Labspace's installation Between Doors as the zone's touchstone. Confronted with an array of doorways pitched up on the green, you pick one and find several more in an endless choose-your-own-adventure (such as it is) way.

Poetic, perhaps, about contingency and choice in our day-to-day, but maybe a little lacking in the flashing lights department that Nuit Blanche so craves. Fear not: Fort York will have plenty of those, from Bruno Billio's one-kilometre long ribbon of multi-coloured LED lights (called, logically, Bright Bundle) to LeuWebb Projects' Melting Point, which will outfit cannons on the Fort York grounds with a glowing river of light. Between that and multiple video installations, there won't be much dark left to be afraid of.

D. City Hall — Performance Anxiety

Counterintuitive sounding, maybe, for the fraught political ground on which it finds itself (not aimed at the mayor, surely), the cluster of projects in and around city hall is meant a little more literally: performance art, that often visceral spectacle that was born in the '60s, erupted in the '70s, became a bad joke in the '80s and all but disappeared in the '90s, only to lie fallow and become reinvigorated in the past decade with a new austerity and force, is the raw material of Heather Pesanti's zone.

At first blush, after looking at a program rife with video elsewhere, an entire zone of real human bodies doing stuff over a dozen hours through the night is equal parts promising — whatever else it is, Nuit Blanche is an endurance test, for all of us — and mildly unsettling (the '80s left a mark that's hard to erase). I'm keen to see 2YouTopia's Vertical City, a maze of scaffolding a single figure will look to navigate throughout the night. Meant to evoke the disorienting claustrophobia of urban living, it might hit a little more close to home, being at Nathan Phillips Square as it is. Our mayor has been playing his own game of snakes and ladders for the better part of a year. He might find some affinities.

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